Emperor Nero (37–68 AD) was a tyrant famous for his sexual appetites and tendency to execute anyone who challenged him (including his mother). The beautiful Poppaea Sabina became his mistress in around 58 AD. Nero made Poppaea’s husband Otho divorce her; he then divorced Octavia (whom he later had assassinated) and married Poppaea. Monteverdi keeps many of these sordid details, and follows the Roman historian Tacitus in depicting Poppea as a scheming minx and Nerone as a hedonistic bully. However, the couple’s exquisite duets (including ‘Pur ti miro’) add a romantic, even tender element to their relationship.

Gustav III of Sweden (1746–92) was an enlightened (if autocratic) monarch and a strenuous political reformer. On 16 March 1792 Jacob Johan Anckarström, a military captain, shot him at a masked ball. Verdi used this dramatic incident as the basis for Un ballo in maschera. However, the only ‘true’ elements of the opera are Gustav’s liberal patriotism, the foretelling of his death by the clairvoyant Ulrica Arfvidsson and the conspiracy between Anckarström and two noblemen. Gustav was no romantic, was never friends with Anckarström and likely never even met Anckarström’s wife. Nor did Gustav die immediately – he survived his assassination for nearly a fortnight before succumbing to septicaemia.

Hans Sachs (1494–1576) was a German shoemaker, playwright and Meistersinger – a member of a guild that organized competitions in poetry and song. He was extraordinarily productive, and wrote more than 6,000 literary works. Wagner stays true to life in making his Sachs a champion of the arts and leading Meistersinger. But Wagner’s Sachs is more pensive, less bawdy in humour and much more melancholy than the real Sachs – who was a widower for less than a year before taking a young second wife. Wagner also omits Sach’s love of animals: a contemporary portrait depicts him playing with a cat, with a dog asleep at his side.

André Chénier (1762–94) was a French poet and one of Robespierre’s last victims. His literary career was not particularly illustrious; he published just two poems in his lifetime and only became famous some twenty-five years after his death with the first edition of his collected poems. Though Chénier was a monarchist, his arrest was actually an accident (the officials believed they were arresting a marquis) and apparently he was only guillotined because Robespierre happened to remember a venomous political poem of his. Giordano and his librettist Luigi Illica transformed Chénier into a liberal idealist, and invented the character of Maddalena in order that he should have a great romance and a glorious, transfiguring death.

Elizabeth I, Robert Devereux, Robert Cecil, Walter Raleigh and others in Britten's Gloriana

Britten’s great historical opera explores the last years of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and her close relationship with the young, brilliant and unstable Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1565–1601). Inspired by literary biographies by Lytton Strachey and J.E. Neale, Britten and his librettist William Plomer stick fairly close to history, including such details as the Queen’s love of music and dancing and Essex’s unreliability as a military leader. The famous incident in Act III when Essex surprises the balding Queen dressing was also based on fact. However, in the interests of time they condensed Essex’s troubles on his return from Ireland, his rebellion and its aftermath.

Richard Nixon (1913–94) considered his 1972 visit to China to meet Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976) as ‘the week that changed the world’. John Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman based many details in their opera on fact: Mao’s charisma, at odds with his physical fragility; the premier Chou En-lai’s skills as a diplomat. But they also emphasize the most sympathetic aspects of the Nixons. Pat Nixon is gentle and idealistic, while Adams and Goodman came to see Richard Nixon as ‘a sort of Simon Boccanegra… self-doubting, lyrical’. By contrast Mao remains enigmatic, while his ambitious wife Chiang Ch’ing and Nixon’s advisor Henry Kissinger are the opera’s villains.

Un ballo in maschera runs until 17 January 2015. Tickets are sold out, but there are 67 day tickets for each performance and returns may become available.The production is a co-production with Theater Dortmund and Scottish Opera and is given with generous philanthropic support from The Royal Opera House Endowment Fund.

Andrea Chénier runs 20 January–6 February 2015. Tickets are still available, and there are 67 day tickets for each performance and returns may become available.The production is a co-production with the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, and San Francisco Opera, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Mrs Aline Foriel-Destezet, Mrs Susan A. Olde OBE, Simon and Virginia Robertson, Spindrift Al Swaidi, Mercedes T. Bass and Mrs Trevor Swete.

When Riccardo, the hero of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, is warned that someone will kill him at his masked ball, he really should take heed. For one thing is certain in opera – parties are bad for your health.

Mozart certainly realized the potency of parties. In the masked ball in Don Giovanni the anarchic Giovanni tries to seduce Zerlina to the sound of three dances performed simultaneously. When he’s caught he barely escapes with his life. Less violent but equally arresting is the Act II finale to Così fan tutte, where Dorabella and Fiordiligi’s marriage to their ‘Albanian’ lovers collapses in startling revelations and recriminations.

Bellini and Donizetti were particularly drawn to the disastrous wedding party. Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor arrives like an avenging fury to prevent Lucia’s forced marriage, and Elvira in I puritani goes mad when her groom disappears. But it didn’t always have to be a wedding – surely the most devastating bel canto party of all comes in Act II of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, where the anti-heroine poisons six noblemen – including, unwittingly, her son.

Verdi loved operatic parties. They gave him the opportunity to deploy great entertainment music, and he knew that the best way to deliver curses and accusations is against a background of frivolity. Take Monterone’s chilling curse inRigoletto during the Duke’s hedonistic banquet – or Alfredo’s terrible denunciation of Violetta in La traviata, amid Spanish dances and gambling. Parties also prove perfect environments for murder, in Un ballo in maschera and also in Les Vêpres siciliennes, where Guy de Montfort survives an assassination attempt at a ball in Act III only (innocently) to precipitate a massacre at his son’s wedding in Act V.

Terrible secrets are revealed at celebrations in Wagner’s operas; the most dramatic comes in Götterdämmerung, when Brünnhilde breaks off her forced wedding to Gunther to accuse Siegfried of treachery. But this is nothing to the chaos of King Herod’s feast in Richard Strauss’s Salome, which culminates in the heroine embracing John the Baptist’s severed head.

Russian operatic parties are powder kegs waiting for an inevitable spark. Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin brings about disaster at Tatyana’s name-day ball by taunting his friend Lensky, who challenges him to a duel. Marfa in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride is poisoned at her engagement party (by an admirer who believes he’s administering a love potion) and then forced to renounce her fiancé and become the Tsar’s wife. But the prize for the most debauched Russian party undoubtedly goes to the drunken wedding orgy in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, where Katerina and Sergei are arrested for the murder of Katerina’s first husband.

There are plenty of gruesome celebrations in 20th-century opera, too. It’s a dance that finally sends Berg's Wozzeck into mental collapse, while the elegant party in Act III of his Lulu ends with a stock exchange crash and the heroine fleeing the police. Schoenberg (Moses und Aron), Schreker (Die Gezeichneten) and Henze (Die Bassariden) all explored the destructive power of orgies, and Britten provides a terrifying picture of mass hysteria in the Act III dance of Peter Grimes. Festivities don’t get any better in our own century: in Turnage's Anna Nicole the heroine’s attempt to host the party of a lifetime ends with her husband’s death and ultimately her ruin.

All this destruction begs the question - can a party in opera ever be enjoyable? Well, the townspeople in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg have a good time (apart from Beckmesser). And if Sharp-Ears’s wedding in Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixenis anything to go by, animals in opera are able to celebrate with the unadulterated joy that so often eludes their human counterparts. But it’s operetta that chiefly celebrates the more cheerful side of partying: the ensembles in praise of friendship and champagne in Johan Strauss II's Die Fledermaus and the final scenes of Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe remind us that parties can – just occasionally – actually be joyful occasions.

Wagner never heard his first completed opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), and his next, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), was performed only once in his lifetime, where it was an unmitigated disaster. His first success was Rienzi, first performed in Dresden in 1842 after Wagner returned from a dire interlude in Paris. Six hours long, replete with ballets, grand choruses, processions and marches, and with possibly the most terrifying tenor part in Wagner's canon, Rienzi is Wagner's bid to out-grand opera French grand opera. While for modern audiences that might be something of a Pyrrhic victory, in the 19th century Rienzi was Wagner's most performed opera – somewhat to the composer's embarrassment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z4L5PTDs1g

Arriving into maturity: Der fliegende Holländer

Der fliegende Holländer’s premiere in Dresden a few months later didn't match Rienzi's success at the time, but musically it marks Wagner’s maturity. Wagner had sold his scenario to Léon Pillet, director of Paris Opéra, in 1841, but to the composer’s horror Pillet commissioned the score from Pierre-Louis Dietsch instead. The premiere of Dietsch's Le Vaisseau fantôme in Paris, just as rehearsals for Der fliegende Holländer began, prompted Wagner to introduce some late revisions, including a speedy relocation from Scotland to the Norwegian coast. Wagner had conceived the opera as a single-act curtain opener for Paris; though he later expanded it into three scenes he continued to think of it as one continuous whole. He was convinced to insert two intervals for the premiere, but in Cosima Wagner's 1901 Bayreuth production she ran the opera without break – a practice followed by many modern productions, including The Royal Opera's. Throughout his life Wagner returned to Der fliegende Holländer. Today, opera houses tend to use either the earliest version or the most definite revisions of 1860.

Understanding 'melos': Tannhäuser

Tannhäuser has the dubious honour of two failed premieres. It was received with bewilderment on its first showing in Dresden on 19 October 1845 – largely because the singers were not up to the score’s singular demands. By now Wagner had refined his ideas of melos (a unique melody essential to each composition) and the result was a particularly challenging role for the titular hero. When in 1861 Napoleon III invited Wagner to stage Tannhäuser in Paris the composer took the opportunity to introduce some significant revisions, including the orgiastic Venusberg ballet that opens the opera. But the riotous Jockey Club de Paris, political opponents of Wagner's patrons and offended at Wagner’s relocation of the ballet from its traditional place after the first interval, were rowdily disruptive, and after three mortifying performances Wagner cancelled the run. He made further revisions to the ‘Paris’ version for an 1875 performance in Vienna, keeping the ballet and dovetailing the overture into the opening of the opera. It’s this version that is most often performed today – though to his death Wagner remained dissatisfied with the work.

King Ludwig II and the Swan Knight: Lohengrin

Lohengrin was first performed on 28 August 1850, though Wagner, exiled in Switzerland after backing the losing side in a political coup, didn't hear it performed until 1861. The premiere was conducted instead by Liszt and was received well, despite the perennial problem of singers not up to their parts. Lohengrin, begun in the winter of 1841–2, was the first fruit of Wagner's obsession with the legend of the Holy Grail. The opera was to have a massive influence – including on Bavarian architecture. Wagner's later patron, the beyond-eccentric King Ludwig II, was inspired in part by Lohengrin to term himself the Swan Knight and build the unfinished fantasy palace Neuschwanstein (New Swan Stone), which he dedicated to Wagner.

Epic opera: Der Ring des Nibelungen

A cycle of four operas, clocking in at 15 hours in total,Der Ring des Nibelungen is one of the most challenging works for an opera company to perform. In it Wagner created a new form of music drama, based on the principles he set out in his 1851 book-length essay Oper und Drama. Condemning what he saw as the commercialism of his contemporaries, he proposed a pure art modelled on his understanding of Ancient Greek theatre, through which society would be served and bettered. In the Ring this philosophy becomes a union between music and text now known as the leitmotif structure. Wagner completely eschewed the number-based format of traditional opera, associating short melodies with dramatic icons and emotions, weaving them together in a continuous composition. The plots are based on Icelandic, Scandinavian and German myths, though Wagner significantly reworked numerous legends to create an entirely original story in which the themes of redemption and sacrifice, constants throughout his mature work, loom large. Though he composed the four operas in order, starting with Das Rheingold in 1853 and finishing Götterdämmerung in 1872, Wagner prepared the texts in reverse, beginning Siegfrieds Tod (which eventually became Götterdämmerung) as early as 1848. At the order of Ludwig II and deeply against Wagner's wishes Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were performed in 1869 and 1870 in Munich, in performances that fell far below Wagner's expectations. The complete Ring cycle was first performed at the inaugural Bayreuth Festival in 1876 on four consecutive nights.

Tristan und Isolde

In the middle of composing the Ring Wagner set aside Siegfried to write Tristan und Isolde, which in the 20th century became arguably his best-known and most influential work – Wagner himself quoted it explicitly in later operas Die Meistersinger and Parsifal. His chief inspiration was his love for Mathilde Wesendonck, poet and the wife of Wagner's generous patron Otto, who in 1857 had given Wagner the villa in which he wrote Tristan. The premiere was serially delayed; one performance had to be postponed at a few hours’ notice after the twin disasters of Isolde losing her voice and bailiffs arriving to confiscate Wagner's possessions. On its eventual premiere on 10 June 1865 Tristan und Isolde created musical history, from the very start of the Prelude with its famous ‘Tristan chord’ (in jazz, a half-diminished 7th). It wasn’t the chord itself that shocked but Wagner's entirely original manipulation of harmony; responding to Tristan and Isolde's yearning and tragedy he creates an aching score where musical resolution is continually evaded, in a language far removed from the diatonic traditions that had governed Western music for centuries.

A return to comedy: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Wagner had conceived of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only comic work beside Das Liebesverbot, in 1845 as a pendant to Tannhäuser, following the Greek model of pairing a tragedy with a satyr play. Recurring musical motifs, as in all Wagner's mature operas, still form the foundation of the melodic material, but quite unlike Tristan and the Ring the opera is structured largely in traditional numbers. The score is coloured with an archaic, modal twist, and for long stretches the vocal lines seem almost improvisatory. In the 1860s Wagner had further developed his ideas of the purity and superiority of German culture, which ultimately would be codified in his 1871 tract Über die Bestimmung der Oper (The purpose of opera). It's partly this that inspired him to meld the innovations of his musical language with more historic forms. Wagner also continued to develop his response to the work of the philosopher Schopenhauer and the renunciation of the will, most fully expressed in Hans Sachs's Act III monologue 'Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn'.

A final masterpiece: Parsifal

Wagner's final work, Parsifal, was the only of his operas to be written with direct experience of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Its staging demands are extraordinary even for Wagner, calling for tiers of choirs arranged over a high dome. Wagner's source was Wolfram von Eschenbach's setting of the legend of Perceval, knight of the Grail, which he began to adapt into a libretto as early as 1845. The verse is his freest, and in it the scenario's explicitly Christian context merges with Buddhist ideals and Schopenhauerian self-abnegation into a meditation on compassion. Wagner’s text allows no simple interpretation, and neither does his score. The vocal lines range from declamatory recitative to expansive melody; the use of motifs is infinitely subtle and yields different interpretations with each listening. As with Meistersinger, the tonality is broadly diatonic and incorporates elements of ancient music: the ‘Dresden Amen’, a common congregational response, here becomes a transcendent expression of the Grail, and a simple four-note bell motif signaling the Grail chamber provides material for two immense transition scenes. Wagner called the opera a Bühnenweihfestspiel – a stage-consecrating festival play – and intended it only for Bayreuth. Ludwig II was the first to break the 30-year embargo in a private performance in Munich just a few years after the premiere. The next performance outside Bayreuth was by the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1903.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzmViYZqwLU

It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Wagner’s mature works on the course of music. But his music never seems to become familiar. His operas – complex, immersive and astonishingly entertaining – continue to entrance.

Tristan und Isolde is a co-production with Houston Grand Opera and is given with generous philanthropic support from Peter and Fiona Espenhahn, Malcolm Herring, Bertrand and Elisabeth Meunier and Lindsay and Sarah Tomlinson.

Der fliegende Holländer is given with generous philanthropic support from Marina Hobson OBE and the Wagner Production Syndicate.

Papageno and Pamina are trying to escape Sarastro’s temple when they are interrupted by the villainous Monostatos. Luckily, Papageno strikes up a sprightly dance tune on his magic bells, whose sound comes from the glockenspiel. Monostatos’s fury vanishes in an instant, and he and his minions, enchanted, dance away happily singing. Papageno and Pamina comment that magic bells like these would surely cure the ills of the world.

Nemorino, inspired by the story of Tristan and Isolde, has purchased an ‘elixir of love’ (in fact, cheap Bordeaux) from the quack doctor Dulcamara. He believes that he has only to drink the elixir for his adored Adina to fall for him within 24 hours. As the wine goes to his head Nemorino feels cheerful. When Adina arrives, he pretends to ignore her, and breaks into song, his merry ‘la-ra-las’ accompanied by strumming strings. Donizetti wittily contrasts Nemorino’s jolly wordless melody with Adina’s growing irritation, as she tries to get his attention and – for once – is ignored.

‘Den Tag seh’ ich erscheinen’ (The day I see dawning) from Act II of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner

The pedantic town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser’s attempts to serenade the beautiful Eva Pogner, but his efforts are constantly interrupted by the cobbler Hans Sachs. With the excuse that he has to finish Beckmesser’s shoes in time for the next day’s singing competition, Sachs marks each of Beckmesser’s musical and poetical faults with a stern blow of his hammer. Wagner cleverly contrasts Beckmesser’s pompous song – accompanied by faltering mandoline, full of florid ornamentation and awkward rhymes – with Sachs’s dry comments. And then it turns out that Beckmesser is serenading the wrong girl anyway!

‘Gonzalve! Gonzalve!’: Duet for Concepion and Gonzalve from L’Heure espagnole by Maurice Ravel

Concepcion’s arranged a romantic rendezvous with the poet Gonzalve while her elderly husband Torquemada is out. But things aren’t going her way. First she has to get rid of the muleteer Ramiro, who wants his watch mended. Then when Gonzalve arrives he’s more interested in declaiming florid poetry (depicted by Ravel in swooping vocal lines and grandiose orchestral crescendos) than getting down to business. Concepcion isn’t impressed and makes frantic attempts to get Gonzalve to concentrate on love-making – but to no avail.

‘There’s no need to fear’ and ‘Up! Drink! Up!’ from scene 3 of Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti

The grim reaper Nekrotzar announces that he will destroy the world at midnight, and recruits the wine-taster Piet the Pot and the astronomer Astradamors to help him. Piet and Astradamors suggest a last feast – washed down with plenty of wine. They dance round Nekrotzar, shouting and insulting him in a jolly folksong-like tune, and order him to drink. Nekrotzar initially prefers to make pompous apocalyptic pronouncements in sonorous tones, but is tempted by the smell of alcohol. The music dissolves into a demonic trio, with jazzy syncopated rhythms and thudding percussion, as Piet and Astradamors continue to mock ‘Tsar Nekro’, and he doggedly downs wine, accompanied by loud orchestral hiccups. The scene soon collapses into anarchy. The following aria, sung in code by the crazed Gepopo, Chief of the Secret Political Police, gives you an idea of the kind of anarchy Ligeti can conjure!

What are your favourite comic moments in opera?

Die Zauberflöte runs 23 February–11 March 2015. Tickets are still available. The production is given with generous philanthropic support from The Jean Sainsbury Royal Opera House Fund.

In 1763, David Garrick shook up the theatre world by banning audience members from sitting onstage at Drury Lane.

Since the theatres had re-opened in 1660 (after the Restoration), it had become common practice to pay a few extra pennies for the privilege of sitting on the stage. A century earlier, audiences at The Globe were also often as concerned with being seen themselves as with watching the play – as one contemporary diarist, Thomas Platter, put it, ‘Anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny; but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a farther door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit… where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen then he gives yet another English penny.’

From the earliest staged performances, audience-watching has played a huge part. So it’s no surprise that the idea of people watching people watching a performance has seeped into theatre and opera, in the form of the play-within-a-play.

Perhaps the most famous example is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose ‘rude mechanicals’ provide much of the comedy with their ‘most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe'. Taking his cue from Shakespeare, Purcell incorporates a masque into his A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired The Fairy Queen. Rather than a comic interlude courtesy of Bottom and co., however, Purcell conjures the god Phoebus to oversee a masque celebrating the four seasons. Almost three centuries later, Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play becomes an opera-within-an-opera in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a scene where the composer sends up both the actors’ misguided dramatic intentions and 19th-century opera in one fell swoop.

In both Strauss’s Salome and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, a show-within-the-show proves to be a turning point. In Salome, we watch Herod voyeuristically enjoying Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ after his ill-advised promise to give her whatever she wants in return. Wagner’s opera, meanwhile, comes to a head with a singing competition between Nuremberg’s Guild of Mastersingers – with a rather happier ending than the singing competition in his earlier opera Tannhäuser.

Some works, though, take the idea further and explicitly frame the entire work as an opera-within-an-opera, unsettling the ‘real’ audience’s sense of reality. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is one such opera.

Originally written as a stand-alone divertissement to be performed after Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Ariadne auf Naxos was later re-worked, with a Prologue added to create the opera that is performed today. In the Prologue, Strauss introduces us to the composer, a music master, a wig-maker, some comedians and a prima donna diva. We see the comic and chaotic preparations for the evening’s entertainment – and then become the audience for the performance itself.

To completely different effect, Berg opens Lulu with a Prologue in which a circus ringmaster addresses the audience and introduces his menagerie – the prize of which is the ‘snake’ Lulu. Like Ariadne, though, the effect is to add another audience layer (or ‘diegetic level’), and to frame the rest of the opera as a performance. The palindromic film that comes half-way through the opera takes us another step deeper.

More recently, composers and directors have adapted this stage tradition to include television-shows-within-operas, to the same effect: think of Anna’s appearance on ‘Larry King Live’ in Turnage’s Anna Nicole and Jonathan Kent’s recent staging of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in which Manon dances for both a live audience onstage and a fleet of television cameras.

Composers, librettists and playwrights continue to be fascinated by our love of spectacle. And in the very best examples these make us question our assumptions about reality itself. When you’re watching an opera-within-an-opera, as Orwell didn’t quite say, you look from actors to audience, and from audience to actors again, but sometimes it’s impossible to say which is which.

Ariadne auf Naxos runs until 13 July 2014. Tickets are still available. The production is given with generous philanthropic support from Hélène and Jean Peters, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth and The Maestro’s Circle.

Antonio Pappano conducts the cast and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in concert at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on 6 July 2014. Tickets are still available.

Before curtain up on The Royal Opera’s new production of Parsifal, baritone Gerald Finley – who is singing the role of Amfortas – spoke to BBC Radio 3’s In Tune.

‘The effect of his transgression before the opera begins overpowers the whole element of the opera,’ said Gerald, speaking of his character, dubbed by presenter Sean Rafferty as 'the betrayer of the Holy Grail'. ‘From the very beginning people are worried about him [Amfortas] and trying to keep him alive. So although it’s not a significant singing role necessarily, it’s very demanding when one is on stage.’

‘We brought it so that there are no dilemmas in terms of where it’s set, it’s absolutely contemporary. The story however, I hope is very clear,’ said Gerald of Stephen Langridge’s new production.

The Canadian baritone performed an extract from Winterreise by Franz Schubert and ‘I wonder as I wander’ by Benjamin Britten live in the studio, as well as speaking about the newly-released recording of Glyndebourne’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

‘I only have one voice, I have to make sure it’s pretty flexible,’ said Gerald about coping with the demand of singing such a wide repertory. ‘I suppose it’s wellbeing in one’s self – good health, good eating, keeping busy and making sure there’s always a project on the fly. To sing Wagner and to play the songs of Britten is a great privilege. I hope I can do both for a long time!’

Now in his mid-60s, Sir John has enjoyed a stellar career over the past 40 years. After a stint as a civil engineer, the bass singer made his Royal Opera debut in Salome in 1977 and since then has become one of the opera world’s most eminent performers, known in particular for his interpretation of Wagner. In the past 34 years, he’s trodden the boards of the world’s leading opera houses – singing at Bayreuth every year between 1988 and 2004 and receiving a knighthood in 2005. Despite the acclaim he’s received he remains extremely down to earth. "I’ve done far more than I ever thought; I’m still learning stuff all the time”. It’s clear he relishes his new part in one of the operas he is most closely associated with.

In the course of his career Sir John has taken a wide range of parts: “I’ve spent the last 20 years singing the best bass parts –from Claggart in Billy Budd to King Philip from Don Carlos, not to mention all those great Wagnerian roles. I’ve also had the honour of having two great parts written for me for this house by Harrison Birtwistle – the eponymous Minotaur and The Green Knight in Gawain. They’re all great parts for a voice like mine. I never expected to do some of them as they’re bass baritone parts and never thought my voice would be high enough. Fortunately however, it seems to have worked out well. There are certain parts I haven’t done that I’d like to however – Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress for example.”

He has over the years, worked with an extraordinary range of artists which reads like a who's who of the operatic and classical world. His first Meistersinger at Covent Garden was in 1993, when he sang the role of Hans Sachs with Thomas Allen as Beckmesser: “Thinking about working with Tom as Beckmesser in particular brings a smile to my face. He’s a very human performer and extremely creative, as well as being rather funny when he wants to be. We’ve had some great times.”

Conductors too have also left their mark on Sir John: “Conducting is a very mysterious business. I hugely enjoyed working with Bernard Haitink – he conducted Meistersinger so beautifully. In rehearsal, he doesn’t say much but everybody who is there is on the edge of their seats waiting to make great music - he’s got this magnetism.”

Over the course of his career, the singer has noticed a change in the approach in the approach of conductors: “I’ve worked with the likes of Von Karajan, Solti and Muti. The old school – Von Karajan and Solti – had the old dictatorial, tyrannical approach. It was very impressive and as a singer you did absolutely what they wanted. They didn’t give you much leeway or freedom. These days things are different. Antonio Pappano is conducting this revival and he is a joy to work with, he keeps a perpetual, lively pulse from start to finish of this long piece. No dictator, yet very demanding.

“I was taught a great deal about discipline in particular by the German director Harry Kupfer who I worked with on The Ring at Bayreuth in 1988. He taught me about stillness and intensity – a combination of the two. You don’t need to move and if you do it may be a very explosive movement, but stillness doesn’t mean deadness, it means even more effort mentally. It took me time to learn that.”

“Give audiences pleasure and express emotion. If you’ll be famous, you’ll be famous,” he muses when asked what his advice to younger singers would be, “concentrate on giving excellent performances”. Sir John’s work ethic and belief in the importance of art seemingly reflects those held by the Meistersingers in the opera.